Brief Introduction to the UTM coordinate system

The Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system is an international

locational reference system that depicts the Earth's three-dimensional
surface in a relatively-accurate, two-dimensional manner.
It relies on the meter unit of measure, and allows users to accurately
and unambiguously identify geographical locations anywhere on the
Earth's surface between the northern limits of North America (84
degrees north latitude) and the southern limits of continent of
Antarctica (80 degrees south latitude).

The remaining north and south polar regions are not included in the
UTM coordinate system due to extreme projection distortions in the
UTM grid.

The UTM zones and grid

The UTM system depicts the Earth's
three-dimensional surface as a flat,
two-dimensional plane by dividing
its surface into 60 equally-spaced
vertical planes known as zones, or
world zones. Sequentially-
numbered 1 through 60, from west
to east, the starting point for the
zones (and the common border
between Zone 1 and Zone 60) is the
180-degree meridian of longitude,
or International Date Line.
British Columbia occupies 5 UTM
zones: 7 through 11.

The world-wide grid for the UTM

coordinate system consists of
parallel-running vertical (easting)
lines and parallel-running horizontal
(northing) lines, each of which is
spaced exactly 1,000 meters (1
kilometer) apart, to form 1,000-
meter squares.
 Brief Introduction to the UTM coordinate system

Easting: UTM grid coordinates

are always written or
conveyed with the easting
data string appearing first,
before the northing data
string. By common
convention, easting
coordinates output from GPs
units are typically followed by
the letter "E".
Vertical lines are measured
from a separate point for each
zone, namely, an imaginary
line lying 500,000 metres west
of the zone's central meridian.
Actually, zones never attain
the full width of 1,000,000
metres which such a
measurement suggests; in
fact, in northern Canada, zone
widths shrink to as little as
80,000 metres (40,000 metres
on either side of the central meridian).
In practice, this means that in BC the actual distance between equal zone points is approx. 425km in the
South and 350km in the North (see illustration below for the importance of the UTM zone; all 4 points
have the same Easting and Northing, but a different zone!)

Northing: In the northern

hemisphere, a zone's southern
boundary (and point of origin) is the
equator, and it assumes the value of
zero meters. Horizontal lines are
designated by their distance from
the equator in metres. Because
Canada's southernmost point is
about 4,620,000 metres from the
equator, all horizontal lines in
Canada have a "northing" value
above that figure.

Note: While easting coordinates are

only six digits in length, convention
often adds a leading zero to make
them seven digits long so they
correspond lengthwise with seven-
digit northing coordinates.